What to do with a theatrical chestnut? Updating the language of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (at the Hudson Theatre through June 10), the playwright Amy Herzog has made its 1879 dialogue smartly contemporary and even devised some laugh lines. But it’s the director Jamie Lloyd who is really the star of this mesmerizing production, despite its being designed as a showcase for an Oscar-winning actress.

As the audience files in, Jessica Chastain, clad in a black dress, sits silently on a chair that slowly and unnervingly spins around the stage on a turntable. She looks like Whistler’s mother, or Norman Bates’s. She anchors an ultra-minimalist production—no color, no set decoration, no scenery changes, no props. The actors are tightly leashed, allowed nothing but a bare minimum of movement. Music is limited to a few atonal rumbles, adding a sense of lurking doom to the already bleak atmosphere. Nearly all dialogue is delivered in low, almost whispery voices, though easily audible to the audience via microphones. Actors who aren’t speaking or being spoken to are positioned just off to the side or to the rear, standing at attention either in rigid profile or with their backs turned. All are dressed in simple, penitent black (or a blue so dark that it might as well be black), suggesting a kind of Puritan mania for astringency.

Lloyd’s dedication to rigor washes away the play’s soapy elements and places it in an abstract or holy realm, appropriate enough given its